Battleship Potemkin

Introspective Peasants Revolting... Actually

Battleship Potemkin
aka Bronenosets Potyomkin
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
USSR 1925 
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

It’s been a few decades since I last revisited Sergei Eisenstein’s oft voted ‘number one film of all time’ classic Battleship Potemkin. So I thought, with the recent Blu Ray release by the BFI of the film coupled with the score that Red Ken, the then mayor of London, commissioned from the Pet Shop Boys for a free live performance accompanying the film in Leicester Square on 12th September 2004, this was a good opportunity to take another look. Although I bought the original CD album of this piece when it was released back then (which is also included in this recent BFI release, along with the Blu Ray), I’d never heard this particular score with the context of the images it was meant to accompany before. So I’m glad this version finally got a release.

Now, Eisenstein was all about the Russian propaganda of course and, this film made in 1925 was put together to commemorate the anniversary of the failed but inspiring Russian Revolution of 1905. And it was much widely acclaimed and, you can’t ask for much more than to have your movie banned in most countries on the fear that it would spark an uprising amongst the working classes in places like France and so on. Over here in the UK, the ban wasn’t lifted for a while and it was finally granted a release, with an X certificate, presumably to deter a certain section of the cinema going population, in 1954. 

The film is a ferocious beast of a movie in terms of the power of images and ideas, for sure. It’s also a case, for those detractors of the art of silent cinema, for a more naturalistic acting style in that medium... it possibly helps that many of the ‘so called actors’ were in fact common people from the streets and navy of good old mother Russia. There’s certainly not much in the way of overdramatic gesturing in this one. 

The film is split into five sections (translated as thus on this particular iteration of the film)... Men And Maggots, Drama On The Deck, The Dead Man Calls Out, The Odessa Staircase and Rendezvous With The Squadron. And it demonstrates a lot of Eisenstein’s signature directorial flourishes for sure. Obviously, Eisenstein was all about the editing and his cross cut montages... to show, for instance, the hard work of the men on the boat cross cut with the mouldering, maggot infested food they are expected to eat being prepared... are all present and correct.

As, of course, is his method of typeage... casting non-professionals to give them an authentic look as visual shorthand and then inserting them into little vignettes staged apart from the main action but made to look like they are part of it, in order to amplify the emotional context of the movie... like little static inserts whereas a film maker today would probably either zoom in or move the camera within the shot. But there’s a lot to be said for doing it this way too and it’s still an effective way of working, I think... if much abandoned in the method of execution these days. 

But there are other things which I feel are less said about the director’s work than is generally lingered on, due no doubt to the incredible impact of his other techniques. I mean, he was obviously as good as Fritz Lang when it came to directing huge crowds of people in unison but, the shot compositions are pretty good too. Like early in the movie when the diagonal ropes of the sailors hammocks as they sleep below decks are juxtaposed with similar shorts of different angles and then, later, reoccurring in the diagonal lines created by the struts, ropes and staircases on the walkways above.

Plus little details which are picked out such as the fallen crucifix of a wrathful priest embedded in the deck or the dislodged glasses hanging from a rope during the scene where the mutineering rebels take control back from their overseers. 

Then there’s the famous slaughter of the civilians by the police on the steps of the Odessa (not that this moment happened on these steps in real life)... one of the most influential sequences in the history of cinema, much used since and always cropping up in cinematic homage to this day, in a film already overflowing with influential and iconographic imagery (there’s a reason why directors like Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder and Michael Mann cite this as their favourite film). 

A brutal and gory sequence with such imagery as the head shot child dying, his mother carrying his body against the troops and also being shot down, the other mother shot and knocking her own baby carriage down the steps (in a fate the actress more or less met in real life 20 years later, when Stalin was having a go at everyone... how many times have we seen this moment reconstructed since?), the woman with the eye shot out and, of course, the montage of the stone lions rearing up from sleep to startlingly awake at last. You can see just why the film is still influential... it’s got some powerful, visual ideas used to push its agenda.

And it’s nice to see this version of the film retains... or perhaps rather recreates... the red coloured flag which Eisenstein himself had hand tinted for the film’s original premiere back in 1925. Which is a very nice touch for modern audiences to see, I think.

As for the score by the Pet Shop Boys... well it’s not bad ‘actually’ and doesn’t, for starters, detract from the movie (I may be hoisted up and taken to task for that but I think it’s fine, sorry). It’s pretty good and well spotted in terms of, for instance, where some sung lyrics might suddenly invade the mix at certain highlights to support and possibly elevate the spirit of revolution which infuses the tale. They could certainly even be accused of Mickey Mousing* it in a few sequences... for good or worse but, again, I think it actually works here.

And, yeah, that’s me done with this recent(ish) Blu Ray presentation of the 2004 UK screening of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. I’d like to think the director would have been okay with this freshly scored version and I think it doesn’t do the film any harm... as long as the kiddies who view it today in their new fangled film studies classes (wish we’d had those in my day) realise that the sonic environment of this version is unlike anything that could be heard contemporary to the film’s original release. I think it’s important that people know that before going in. And, if you are aware of that and haven’t seen this version... maybe pick up a copy. It’s still a pretty great movie.

*The once very popular but unfashionable for a while practice of a composer matching notes to catch on screen action in a film... yeah, they mostly all still do it and I don’t think it’s a particular bone of contention anymore, it’s nice to say. 

Warlords Of Atlantis

Bell To Hell

Warlords Of Atlantis
Directed by Kevin Connor
UK 1978
EMI
Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Full on spoilers I’m afraid.

The fourth and final film in Imprint’s Tales Of Adventure Collection 9, a collection celebrating the British fantasy films of Doug McClure, is Warlords Of Atlantis. Now, I never liked this film as a kid, I’ll say that up front. And it’s easy to see why I was so disappointed. Two simple words... Star Wars. 

I’d seen the George Lucas opus as it was released in the UK, right in the last week of 1977 and, well... anything else which didn’t live up to that film (which changed cinema forever, for bad or worse, depending on what particular aspect of the art/business you are examining) wasn't going to hold my attention for very long. No droids, nobody spraying laser beams at each other, no spaceship dogfights. Unfair to poor old Warlords Of Atlantis, for sure but, yeah, in this case, to this 10 year old boy... timing was everything. 

Anyway, I don’t remember sitting through it again since (even on the telly when it used to get shown regularly during the holiday seasons in the 1980s), so I really wasn’t expecting much from it now. 

I was very surprised, therefore, that I found this one more than held it’s own with two of the previous movies in this set, not to mention walking all over The People That Time Forgot (reviewed here) in terms of being an interesting movie. 

Set in 1896, the film’s two main stars are Doug McClure and Peter Gilmore as the brawn and brains team searching a certain part of the ocean for, unknown to McClure, the lost city of Atlantis. They go down in a diving bell and actually find it, while the crew in the ship above are split into two factions and trying to kill each other because of a big, gold, Atlantean statue they’ve sent up. Then they are dragged into Atlantis, along with the majority of the crew on the ship above (who are attacked by a giant octopus), under a cave in the ocean and out into one of the five surviving cities of Atlantis. 

Populated by Atlanteans who, pretty much on all accounts, seem friendly but mean them some harm. Gilmore is segregated and the two Atlantean ‘chief warlords’ (just trying to make any sense of the title here folks), played by Raymond Massey and, in her last film, Cyd Charisse, put a future seeing helmet on him and intend to drain his brain, after showing him sights of the future such as Hitler’s Third Reich which they plan to instigate (which makes you wonder if anyone learns anything after the conclusion of this movie). 

Meanwhile, Doug McClure and the surviving sailors... including Shane Rimmer playing against type (and with a beard, no less) and a young, villanous John Ratzenberger (four years before he became the regular character Cliff on Cheers)... team up with the former crewmembers of the Marie Celeste and other ships. These include McClure’s sexy love interest played by Lea Brodie (and her astonishingly adorable cleavage, shots of her used from this film in the opening credits of much missed Saturday children's TV show Tiswas) with future replacement M, James Bond’s boss, Robert Brown, playing her father (before he gets quickly devoured by a giant monster). These people have been altered and given gills so they can never leave the place of their imprisonment but, they all help in an attempt to get the heroes and villains of the upper world to make their escape, while various monsters are attacking Atlantis. And of course, adventurous, not bad for the budget, shenanigans ensue.

Now then, I wasn’t expecting much from this but, the film is interesting in the decisions it takes because, yeah, it really is dark. For instance, the girl remains behind at the end because, as I said, they’ve all been surgically altered to have to stay in Atlantis (even though they’re all breathing air in their environments, so that makes absolutely no sense!) and some of the villains of the crew get away with no consequences for their scoundrel actions either. The story just seems to heap on misfortune after misfortune but, grim as it is, McClure gives the film some uplift when it’s needed. And there’s also some unintentional humour along the way too. For instance, most of the monsters look splendid but, towards the end of the movie, when McClure and co are trying to escape Atlantis, they are attacked by a constant barrage of flying coelacanths, which looks pretty silly and you can imagine the crew just throwing them into shot at the actors off camera.

Other things of note? 

Well, there’s an absolutely brilliant jump scare in the early sequences of the movie, when a big aquatic dinosaur pops it’s head up into the bottom of the diving bell (numerous times, in fact) and tries to eat McClure and Gilmore. I wasn’t expecting it from a film like this and, yeah, it really got me. I was delighted I actually jumped. 

What else? Okay... the colours and shot compositions in the film look absolutely amazing, especially in the scenes in the higher echelons of the city, where columns shaped like inverted pyramids purport to hold the structure up and the director and cinematographer make much, brilliant use of the many diagonals to frame the various characters. 

One last thing... the Atlanteans are depicted as an alien race who have come to Earth from a dying Mars. Now the writer of this film is none other than Brian Hayles, who you may or may not remember was, eleven years prior to this movie, the original creator and writer of the Doctor Who villains, The Ice Warriors... who also hailed from that same planet. So Hayles must have had an interest in Mars at the time, I reckon. 

But that’s me about done with Warlords Of Atlantis and, I’m delighted to say I had an absolutely splendid time with it, in general, this time around. My one regret is that the film Peter Cushing was shooting at the time over-ran and so he couldn’t join this one and renew his working relationship with McClure, as was originally intended. But, this is still a nice little example (perhaps one of the last hurrahs) of British adventure fantasy of this type to get a release in cinemas and, yeah, I think it works really well. The superbly transferred Imprint disc is a little lighter on extras than the others in the set and I can’t help but think that if UK label Indicator had got hold of these, they would probably have also included the Super 8 digest versions of the movies as well. Still, this particular Tales Of Adventure box is a superb treat for fans of these kinds of cinematic marvels and Imprint have done a wonderful job. So thank you Imprint... can we have some more old serials now please?

The Inspector Wears Skirts IV

 

Retirement Blues

The Inspector Wears Skirts IV
aka 92 Ba wang hua yu Ba wang hua
Hong Kong 1992 Directed by Wellson Chin 
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Well now, apart from the first of these movies, which included Cynthia Rothrock, I’d have to say that this series of films is not something I’d really wish to revisit again anytime soon. That being said, The Inspector Wears Skirts IV starts off with a fairly strong opening half an hour, before completely blowing it for most of the rest of the running time. So this at least puts it a little higher in terms of entertainment value than the second and third films in the franchise. 

We actually start with a full blown action sequence of the remaining members of the old SKIRTS unit, trying to save some hostages, with some getting killed or injured. We then get some cartoon illustrations and later freeze frames from old films in the series to fill us in on what some of the characters have been doing since leaving the force. Then we have the graduation ceremony for the new girls, almost all of whom resign because they don’t respect their boss. However, due to a hostage situation and a gangster trying to get the police to release his kingpin father, the remaining two skirts go to recruit some of the old gals, by fair means or fowl, to help them get their mojo back (for want of a better description). They are also led by the new ‘Golden Skirt’ who is there to teach them, played by none other than Cynthia Khan. 

Now, one of the old gals they manage to get back, just about, is May, played again by Kara Ying Hung Wai as a person driven crazy by her experiences in the SKIRTS... so they have to get her released from a mental health institution (think like a female version of Murdoch from The A Team, is the way she plays her this time around). And then, of course, no SKIRTS movie would be complete without the return of Sandra Kwan Yue Ng as Amy, now divorced from the most unlikely guy in the third film and raising her son as a single parent. I have to say, this really shows up the producers idea that the third movie, though still sharing the same director, doesn’t really count as part of the franchise in their books... so it really doesn’t follow on from the character as we left her at the end of the last movie at all.

And I’d like to tell you this was more consistently entertaining than the last one but, we’re again assaulted by very crude and broad humour which mostly fails to land but, at least there’s a lot more action this time around and it feels more like a Hong Kong martial arts piece in that sense. But yeah, there’s really not much going for it and when the finale involves a school full of child hostages (including Amy’s kid) there’s even a sequence where said kid sets booby traps for a comical henchman to get repeatedly caught in, like the film just suddenly turned into Home Alone for a few minutes. 

The one thing which does raise this is the quality of the subtitles... and if you’re buying the British version put out by 88 Films, if you want an extra, unintentional comedy treat (which, lets face it, if you’re watching this series, may well be the only way you’re going to get a laugh)... then said subtitles seem like they’re particular tailored for the British audience. I lost count of the times the various characters say things on the subtitles like... “Bloody Hell”, “Bollocks”, “Piss Off” and “You Wanker”. I mean, I’m assuming this has been re-subtitled for the recent American release of this movie?

Highlights to this one would be the novelty of cartoon pictures, the moment when a gangster in a wheelchair opens fire with twin machine guns coming from said chair and a strange, metatextual moment when one of the characters comments on how dream-like a particular location is, which is all shot soft focus so she’s commenting on the camerawork as much as anything.

However, at the end of the day, a few neat moments and a strong opening do not make for a good film and are unable to hoist The Inspector Wears Skirts IV up from the mess it gets itself into. Probably the second best of the franchise but, yeah, really nothing in here for me to recommend to others, that’s for sure. 

Rashômon

Deceitful Rider

Rashômon
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Daiei Japan 1950 
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

“Women can’t help crying. They’re naturally weak.”
The Bandit

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story ‘In The Grove’, which I have read in English translation but not for a couple of decades now, is the basis for this very important film, Rashômon, by the great Akira Kurosawa. It’s a landmark for so many reasons and, hooray, it has my two favourite actors in this one, Toshiro Mifune as a bandit and the great Takashi Shimura as a woodcutter. 

It’s a film which starts at the Rashômon Gate*, various static shots of which, in the pouring rain, punctuate the opening credit cards. And then we see two characters, Shimura and yet another of he and Mifune’s Seven Samurai co-stars (I think there’s a fair few of them in this, despite the small cast), Minoru Chiaki as a priest. Both are sheltering from the kind of hard rain that only Kurosawa could create and capture (I think with added black ink rather than milk in this case), when they are joined by a third person, played by Kichijirō Ueda, who wants to know why the two are puzzling, despairing in fact, about various witness accounts they’ve just seen in the trial of the aforementioned bandit. 

Okay, so from here the film goes into various flashbacks, both from this refuge and also within the stories from the trial, which tells the tale of a murderous (or possibly even suicidal) forest encounter between Mifune’s bandit, a samurai played by Masayuki Mori and his wife, played by Machiko Kyô. And each person tells a completely different version of the events that the woodcutter himself saw, in his fourth version of the story, which even then is not believed. Each version differing wildly in tone and intent within the same basic set up of a bandit raping the samurai’s wife. Even the samurai who was killed, by one means or another, by the end of the sequence of events, gives his side of the story, being brought back to speech at the trial through a spiritual medium, played by Noriko Honma

Six performances so electrically charged that they positively crackle with energy, combined with what was then deemed, at least by the West, as groundbreaking cinematic technique.

There are a few reasons why people still worship at the cinematic temple of Rashômon to this day and one of them, of course, is that the very phenomena of various eyewitness accounts and people’s memories conflicting with each other has slipped into common usage in the English language, being known now as a Rashômon-like occurrence. I, myself, on numerous occasions where I’ve had to do jury service, have seen how the eyewitness evidence of two or more witnesses can often be diametrically opposed to each other (either that or the police are incredibly stupid... take your pick).

But this is not the only reason why it is remembered...

The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and, two years later, won an Honourary Academy Award, the film often being credited as to why the Academy invented the Best Foreign Movie category. In other words, it was the film that put Japanese cinema on the map (which to the Japanese meant that the film must be somehow deficient, if the crazy Westerners could understand it... and not be a true Japanese product). I mean some film was bound to do that for Japan at some point but... yeah, this was the one. But why?

Well, the first flashback and many subsequent scenes has the moving camera pointing up directly at the sun (with the tree canopy against the sky almost becoming another character here)... often accredited as being the first film to do so (although there were, I suspect, silent films doing that before 1950) but, as importantly, the film uses a lot of hand held camera technique, which was also a bit of an eye opener. I’ve heard many directors tell of the first time they saw this and the way the camera was freed and allowed them to contemplate what else could be done with cinema. Also, in reference to the fact that the different flashback sequences, each eliciting very different performances by the lead actors (it’s quite something when, in the fourth segment, Machiko Kyô kinda goes mad and slips into the trademark, over enthusiastic, wild Mifune laugh from the first sequence which would later reappear in Seven Samurai, and make it her own) and they way the medium of film suddenly seemed so free and flexible. And the rigorous fight between the bandit and the samurai in the first recollection is performed as two inept men fighting comically when it’s observed for the fourth time.

Plus, of course, what Kurosawa could so with a 4:3 aspect ratio is just amazing. Here are just three of the many shots which are utterly brilliant here...

The samurai first coming across Mifune sitting against tree on the opposite side of screen, a huge tree trunk turning the vertical space between them into a thick black separator, framing the actors in their own slivers of space.

Another shot of the upper torso and head of Shimura in close up, centred large in the screen, with two other characters in long shot over each shoulder as they converse. Again, another separator, this time made from one of the characters (see one of the shots pictured above).

Finally, Minoru Chiaki clutching one side of a column in close up, the structure taking up the right half of the screen as an area of darkness. Then Shimura says something and we pan right, the column now taking up the left hand side of the screen as we catch up to a medium shot of Shimura standing in the background all in one motion. It’s like a moving series of frames and all this stuff I’m describing in terms of visual creativity is just a small handful of much of the movie in terms of excellence in shot composition (which, to be fair, you expect from the greatest director in the world... which is, of course, Akira Kurosawa). 

And that’s just about it from me about Rashômon, I think. It’s obviously influential and has also been remade a fair few times... I still need to see the Western remake with Paul Newman and William Shatner entitled The Outrage but, even the great Mario Bava had a crack at this when he turned it into a fairly sexless sex comedy in his film Four Times That Night, if memory recalls (what do you expect when you let Dick Randall produce your movie, eh?). Rashômon, though, is definitely the film that put Japanese cinema and, by default, Kurosawa, on the international map and most cineastes would have surely seen this one by now. But, if you haven’t, you should probably look this one up... it added greatly, I think, to the grammar of cinema in all it’s forms. Another of the great director’s masterpieces. 

*Originally an entranceway to Kyoto but destroyed by storms over the 9th and 10th centuries.

Flying Disc Man From Mars

 

Mars Attacks... Somewhat

Flying Disc Man From Mars
Directed by Fred C. Brannon
Republic 1950
Imprint Tales Of Adventure Volume 4 box

Long term readers of this blog will no doubt know of my passion for old theatrical serials, with special emphasis on the talkies of the 1930s to the 1950s. So it really gives me no pleasure to say that this 1950 effort, Flying Disc Man From Mars, is easily the worst serial I’ve seen coming from Republic (and probably the worst serial I’ve seen, period). 

The story involves airplane pilot for hire/security boss Kent Fowler (played by Walter Reed) and his crew are working on and off for an ex-Nazi scientist (his history unknown to them), played  by James Craven. However, a single martian in his flying saucer, Mota (played by Gregory Gaye) lands on Earth and enlists the help of said scientist and hired goons, in order to take control of the Earth with some kind of plot involving the attainment, loss and then attainment again of various quantities of stolen plutonium. Of course, Kent tries to stop this and it’s over halfway through the serial before he even realises the scientist hiring him is the evil boss. 

And it’s terrible. 

Lois Collier, who plays Kent’s secretary, has pretty much nothing to do here and I was surprised since there have been a fair few strong female characters in those early serials, through the decades. But she’s just wasted. The whole serial consists of chasing or luring the bad guys, getting into a fight with a cliff hanger… and then doing exactly the same thing the next week. Which, to be fair, is all serials, but the lack of different locations, for starters, makes this one seem especially boring. 

Which annoys me because Republic were famous for their fist fights where everything in a room gets frantically broken and used as a weapon. This one, although there are plenty of them, seems somehow more sedate by Republic standards. And I hate to say the action in a Republic serial is dull but… that’s just what it is here. And the sci-fi element is nothing if not toned down. Mot wears his costume in a few scenes (recycled from another Republic serial) and his saucer is also recycled from another serial too. The dead give away on this is… why would a Martian flying saucer have a Japanese rising sun flag emblem on its tail? There’s not even a dodgy looking robot to dull the pain here. 

And as for those all important cliff hanger endings… I’m sad to say that pretty much everyone is a cheat in this serial. One week you will see the hero blown up in a car crash, exploded in a plane crash or caught in a bridge collapse etc. And then the next week they’ll replay it with newly inserted footage of him jumping from the car or parachuting from the plane. And so on. 

And, yeah, short review but I’ve not much else to say other than, Flying Disc Man From Mars does not really live up to the promise of its title as excitingly as you might hope for. I’m probably never going to watch this again, nor the cut down feature conversion which Imprint have also made available. However, I do still wish to express my gratitude to Imprint for fully restoring these serials for a home release, finally. This one may be dull but the transfer makes it look like it was shot only last week… so keep up the good work, guys and gals. You are appreciated. 

Peninsula

A Truckful Of Dollars

Peninsula
aka Bando
aka Train To Busan 
Presents Peninsula
South Korea 2020 
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho
Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers on the tone of the ending.

Peninsula is the third and, to date, final of the loose bunch of movies which deal, with independent characters and stand alone stories, with the same zombie virus outbreak which was the subject of both Seoul Station (reviewed here) and Train To Busan (reviewed here).

This one focuses on a guilt ridden ex-soldier Jung (played by Gang Dong-won) and his brother who are living a meaningless survival (after the loss of his brother’s wife and son in the opening sequences... as they tried to escape from the zombie infestation on a ship)... until a local mob boss puts together a team, including them, to go by boat into the zombie infested Peninsula of the title and collect a truck which was dumped with millions of US dollars in it, before it could get out. So, yeah, if this sounds familiar, it does have a similar premise to Zack Snyders Army Of The Dead, which came out a year later (and which I reviewed here). 

This one is fast and furious in its delivery of the story and... as you would expect, all the things that could go wrong, do go wrong and it’s not long before Jung finds himself teamed up with one of a small family of survivors played by Lee Jung-hyun, with her daughters and father... trying to retrieve the truck and his brother, who has fallen into the hands of an evil, bread and circuses, organised bunch of survivors with a strong military presence. 

Before long, we have two separate parties interested in getting the truck full of money back to the pick up boat, with everybody fighting and trying to outlive the zombies who are getting in the way of everybody. And it does what you’d expect from a modern zombie film, to be honest. It’s pretty much a body count movie with a zombie threat which is constant but, ultimately not as frightening as it possibly should be. This one isn’t quite as focussed as Train To Busan, which had a claustrophobic train carriage setting to focus on and work to its advantage. Nor is it anywhere near as cynical and bleak as Seoul Station. It’s interesting how anime and manga both seem to be able to get away with much more mature discussion points than live action movies but, then again, the same is true of their Western equivalents in places like the US and the UK so, I guess it’s all relative.

The film has some wonderful lighting at the start... a kind of neon-esque lighting when the two brothers are recruited for the task (think I just made a new word up there but, you know what I mean) and then later, it gets more muted because, in this film, it’s a known fact that the zombies can’t really see at night, so just stay quiet and they won’t be able to properly hunt you, is the thing. This results in most of the action of the film taking place at night so... yeah, like I said, it looks more pastier and muted as the film goes on. 

Now there’s a lot of personally tragedy throughout the story, as various stories and characters are explored but, the one thing I was surprised at is that, relatively speaking at least, this film has a much more upbeat and almost compromised ending when it comes to the fate of four of the characters. I was expecting it to end in more tragedy and death and... it almost does before one character gets a bit of a reprieve. But that’s okay, it’s nice ot have a bittersweet win every once in a while, I guess. 

And those are my thoughts on Peninsula... not as good or engaging as the previous two movies, for sure but, I had a pretty fun time with it and I’d watch it again at some point. If you are into zombie films in general then this one surely won’t fail to entertain and I am left wondering now if the director feels he will revisit any of these zombie virus tales again in the future. Time will tell, I guess. 

Sudden Impact

Dirty Law

Sudden Impact
Directed by Clint Eastwood
USA 1983
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay... more spoilers. Big ones. Take a look at them... make my day!

The Enforcer (reviewed here) was supposed to be the last Dirty Harry movie but, a string of less than stellar box office performances and certain other factors brought about this sequel, Sudden Impact, seven years later. I think it was a good choice and it made the most money, I believe, out of the five movies in this sequence. Although he’d been offered the direction of at least one of the previous Dirty Harry movies and had directed numerous other films, even directing one of the scenes in the first in this series, Eastwood finally agreed to pick up the reigns on this one and he does not disappoint. It was also the last of six movies that he and his then girlfriend Sondra Locke made together. 

This one’s a little different than the others too and, many might say the character oversteps his moral parameters and elevates himself above the law... which, of course, he does but, it’s also a crowd pleaser because of that, I think. It tells the story of Jennifer Spencer, played by Locke, who was gang raped along with her sister ten years prior to the main action of this film. There are flashbacks to that sequence, which made her sister non-responsive and with her mind lost in hospital since... but I have to say the constant flashbacks to highlight characters who took part in this crime does seem a little heavy handed, especially by today’s standards, I think.

So, it’s ten years later and Jennifer is slowly seeking out each of the perpetrators and killing them with a gunshot to the genitals (her signature move) followed by a gunshot to the head. She travels to the coastal town to catch up with the perps one by one in their home territory but it’s also where Harry, played by Eastwood, ends up, primarily to get him out of San Francisco and partially to investigate the first of these crimes, as it’s the home town of the first of an ever increasing number of victims. This brings him into friendship and romantic entanglement with Jennifer and, the usual load of trouble with authority figures.

And it’s all good fun. 

There’s a nice line where Eastwood crashes a party to intimidate a suspect (he manages to accidentally intimidate him into a fatal heart attack) and he foreshadows the potential for harm to two bodyguards by asking the lady on the door to phone for an ambulance due to the two guys suffering multiple abrasions and lacerations. Of course, this is a nod back to A Fistful Of Dollars, by way of Kurosawa’s original template of that movie, Yojimbo, where the leads asks for a number of coffins to be prepared. A lot of the film takes place at night, which seems to give all the characters a more sinister tone and Jennifer is certainly no exception. The play of shadow and light in certain shots really hammers home the darkness, such as a shot where we are watching a front view of Locke working on a painting but the artificially created light throws the shadow of her arm painting into a small section of the screen behind her. There’s almost a German expressionist element to the shot. 

The film opens strongly, after we see Jennifer despatching her first victim, with Eastwood briefly attending a court case before going to a diner and being warned a hold up is in progress by the waitress, who has been serving his coffee for the last ten years, dumping a load of sugar into his cup. It’s in this scene where he first uses his latest  and most culturally influential catchphrase “Go ahead... make my day.” 

All well and good but let’s talk about the waitress in this scene. One of Clint’s early roles was a very brief, almost but not quite an extra level part in Tarantula (reviewed here). The film starred Mara Corday as the leading lady and she and Clint Eastwood had been good friends ever since. It’s she who plays the waitress here and she also turns up in a few other of his films over the years.  

Lalo Schifrin provides one of his best scores for the series, taking on contemporary percussion style orchestration into his usual fusion of jazz and suspense and... it’s really something. There are also a few nods to his original Dirty Harry score thrown into the mix. 

But lets finish up with the real elephant in the room here. The audience probably had a problematic unease building up when they first saw this movie... I know I did. The problem being that, while she’s clearly been disturbed and affected by her experiences, Locke’s character is absolutely who the audience is siding with. Up until now, Harry has always been about justice rather than the law but, it always came down to a line he wouldn’t cross. Justice must prevail but, only within the limitations of the law. Not here though. He finally crosses the line and does the right thing in spite of the law... breaking it and muddying the waters with a specific piece of evidence so Jennifer can go free at the end. I’m still not sure how I feel about it all these years later, in all honesty. It’s a moment which severely compromises the Harry Callahan character but, at the same time, nobody wants to see Jennifer brought to justice for her own crimes either. Everyone she takes out is pretty horrible and her vigilante character is serving up revenge that seems to bring a real sense of justice to the piece. 

So yeah, Sudden Impact brings a taint on Clint Eastwood’s character but it makes it a very interesting entry in the series (although not my favourite... that will always be The Enforcer). After this... well nobody really expected Eastwood to do anymore of these things but, just five years later, what is now the last of the series was released at the cinema. In all honesty, I remember hating that one when I went to see it but, let’s see if it’s improved any over time. I’ll be revisiting that one next.

Libertine London

Sexing A Paragrab

Libertine London - 
Sex In The 
Eighteenth-Century Metropolis
By Julie Peakman
Reaktion Books Ltd
ISBN 9781789148473

Just a quick shout out for a delightful book I was gifted a couple of Christmases ago and, because of various issues in my life (such as an overabundance of new books to read), I have only now just got to indulge in. Subtitled Sex In The Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, the tome Libertine London by sexual historian Julie Peakman (now there’s a candidate for nominative determinism if ever I saw one) is a stunning tour through the streets, gardens, palaces and brothels of the time and it’s extremely interesting, especially if you live in the capital as I do and know many of the streets in question. 

So the book starts out explaining the vast gap between male and female libertines and then, as it goes chapter by chapter through the book, makes clear a kind of hierarchy of so called ‘fallen women’. Such as the differences between streetwalkers, bawds, courtesans, strumpets, mistresses and so on. It also goes through the repercussions of the various ‘choices’ made by the ladies in question, how they were publicly perceived and, often as not, publicly punished for their position in society. Some became famous, some made their fortune several times over... many were not lucky enough to do either and came to a sticky end. But whatever their final fate, Peakman paints their tales in a sympathetic and informative fashion... and you can really tell she’s done her research. 

And when I say informative, some areas were truly enlightening. 

For instance, I knew just from logically breaking down the silliness of the male mind that sex workers selling their trade from a bawdy house or brothel could fetch more money from a client at the time if they were deemed a virgin. So I assumed many lied about their sexual status to increase the purse but I didn’t realise to what lengths they would go to fake their virginity... such as the stitching up of their hymen. Or, as in the case of the fictional Fanny Hill but, obviously drawn from the real life practice, going down to the local butcher with a sponge and soaking up some blood so, in the heat of their customer’s passion, they could quickly splash the blood from the sponge now secreted in their room onto their vagina to make good on their claim and up the price.

The book uses transcripts from legal documents and cases to build a picture of some of the women who populate this magnificent tome, describing what it was like to live in a London fraught with peril where robbery, rape and violence ruled the streets and back alleys. Peakman also uses popular printed pamphlets and books about various women, sold on the streets at the times, to cross reference and validate some of the details of the biographies but, not all is taken as seriously as the original writers would have liked, as there was obviously a lot of spice added to the ‘accounts’ sold for public consumption at the time. 

And the book is also handsomely illustrated with various items such as full colour reproductions of famous paintings of many of the ladies discussed herein (many of which I imagine hang in galleries to this day) and also things like newspaper pages and satirical cartoons of the time, commenting on the various stories of specific ladies being discussed. 

Such interesting details come to light such as the fact that if a bawdy house did not contain any beds, then there was no obvious evidence to the law that it was a brothel. Or that the celebrated courtesans of their day, such as actresses and ladies receiving ardent admiration from people higher up the food chain such as governors or royalty, were pretty much seen as the pin up girls of their day. It talks about the way that the better off courtesans of the day could hire a box at the theatre so that suitors could line up to engage their activities for later in the evening, for example. And I was also interested and, somewhat, mollified that the medical profession was just as distrusted in those times as it seems to be becoming again now, in these days of post-pandemic distrust of our governmental resources like the much maligned but somewhat hard to negotiate auspices of the NHS. 

And that’s me just about done with Libertine London - Sex In The Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, other than to say I found this one really interesting and am actively seeking out other books by Peakman in a similar vein (a recent trip to Foyles snagged me a nice hardback copy of her volume Licentious Worlds so, that’s another in the queue). If you’re interested in this kind of subject matter you will surely find the rewards between the covers as illuminating as I.

The Sand

Sandwiches There

The Sand
USA 2015 Directed by Isaac Gabaeff
Frightfest presets DVD Region 2

Why can you never get hungry on a beach? Because of all the sand-which-is there!

Or, in the case of this film, The Sand, the answer is... because you are an unknown, carnivorous creature sitting under a large area of the sand and feasting upon any humans who get even close to making contact with said sand. 

Okay, so this film is another of the free DVDs I snagged at Frightfest some years ago and, again, it’s one of the better ones although, it does have some negative stuff in it too. Now, the first thing I thought of when I looked at the title was that it’s maybe a remake of the old 80s classic Blood Beach (a film sorely in needing of a modern HD release) and, even in Alan Jones’ introduction to the movie, which is an option to play on this DVD, he mentions that particular film. However, this movie isn’t really a straight up remake of that one at all and, although I wasn’t quite as taken with it as Mr. Jones, I did have a fairly good time with it, it has to be said.

The opening ten minutes or so was a little hard to get through for me, consisting of chaotic, shaky cellular phone footage of a teen party taking place on the beach one night, to establish some of the characters and also that the organiser had asked for everyone to put thier phones in a bag (yeah, that’s not going to be a set up for a scene later in the movie now, is it?) and that one of the party goers finds this huge, seaweedy looking rock, which most audience members will probably realise is an egg from early on. The party footage is interspersed with languid shots of an abandoned beach the next morning, in slow and languorous camera movements. Wait... did I say abandoned? No, there are eight people left sleeping from ‘the night before’ (four guys and four gals), all in the same area of the beach. Two on a lifeguard station, four in a car, one on a bench and one stuffed into an oil can by his friends.

As they come back to life and before their feet touch the sand, one of them sees a gull land on the sand, get stuck and then get eaten by it. She tries to warn the others (all are within earshot and sight of each other) but the hungover girl on the beach immediately gets stuck on the sand and shares the same fate as the bird... but not before one of the guys in the car runs to the rescue and gets similarly stuck and eaten himself (in one of the more picturesque and believable pieces of goriness in the movie). It soon becomes clear that the found ‘egg’ hatched at some point and all the other people at the party the night before have been eaten by the beach, in this abandoned strip where barely anyone comes. Once the surviving six realise that they can’t touch the sand and, once various hot dogs have been thrown  to try and ascertain the size and shape of the area of the sand which is hostile, the film consists of the various attempts of these remaining people to escape their fate, as the rules of ‘the sand’ and the monster beneath become more defined and their number gradually diminishes. 

And it is an entertaining movie with some nice performances by the likes of Brooke Butler and Meagan Holder. Some of the sequences, such as when one of the girls is balancing on the back bumper of the car trying to get the trunk open to get to the bag of phones inside, are fairly intense and suspenseful. Which makes it even more annoying when I say that, in some ways, the budget lets the film down a little. I know it’s a low budget horror production (shot in twelve days with the same cast and crew after another movie which fell through... I get it) and that’s often the best kind but, I have to say that much of the CGI in this really lets it down and I kinda wish they’d gone for more practical effects. When a passing policeman (temporarily protected by his non-organic shoes for a short while) who obviously doesn’t believe what’s going on, get his arm chomped off by the beast, the resulting stump gushing blood looks totally unrealistic and just, I dunno, kind of watery. 

Similarly, although the gazillions of small, cotton like tendrils of the creature which raise up from the sand when anything is in close proximity look quite effective but, when they decide to go full on giant tentacle terror towards the end of the movie, the CGI appendages just don’t look like they’re there in the same shot... they literally look like they’ve been cartooned over the top of the film (which they kinda have, I guess).

However, special effects don’t maketh the movie and, though I would have liked more money pumped into the effects work (and I rarely ever say that about special effects because, I usually don’t care anything about them), it was still an entertaining ride of a modern horror B-movie and I think it would play well as part of a an all nighter with friends and liberal amounts of alcohol. The Sand is nowhere near one of the better monster movies I’ve seen but, there’s obviously a lot of love gone into this one and it kinda works. 

The Mandalorian And Grogu

Crest Of The Razor

The Mandalorian And Grogu
aka Star Wars: The Mandalorian 
And Grogu
Directed by Jon Favreau
USA 2026
Lucasfilm
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: This will probably have some very minor spoilers in it.

So the new attempt by Disney to pull some box office back from a franchise they’ve already run into the ground, namely the Star Wars franchise, is actually not a terrible movie... but it does have its problems. Titled The Mandalorian And Grogu, the film follows on from the TV show The Mandalorian and continues the exploits of Din Djarin (The Mandalorian, played by Pedro Pascale and a few others when he wears the mask) and Grogu (played mostly by CGI).

And, though the story is a completely stand alone adventure from the regular series... well therein lies the problem. 

Now, regular readers will know I’m not exactly the biggest fan of The Mandalorian but, in terms of that property, this is a pretty well put together movie, at least for the first half of the film (yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get there) and is much more enjoyable than the episodes of the TV show. That being said, although it’s a half good movie... is it a half good Star Wars movie? Well no, it still doesn’t quite feel like it belongs in the Star Wars universe, I would have to say. Although, to be fair, it does try its best... but it also tries to be a lot of things... some of which are really cool but, are equally not necessarily giving off Star Wars vibes. I mean, I don’t think George Lucas would ever had conceived of this as a story in quite this way and... depending on what generation of Star Wars viewer you are... that may well impede your reception to the movie, for sure.

Now the other thing about the film is that, although it ultimately tells one story, it does seem more episodic than I was expecting. Not episodic in the way the original movies were as they tried to emulate the old Flash Gordon serials (reviewed by me here, here and here) but more like the whole thing is a game of two halves... the first half being a James Bond style opening sequence followed by a rescue mission that goes wrong, nicely setting up some new characters and ending after a gladiatorial combat scene. And up to that point... apart from some issues like the old serial title crawl which featured in the original movies being absent, not to mention some large passages of synthesiser music replacing the traditional orchestral leitmotif one expects form a Star Wars film... it’s actually a pretty enjoyable movie. 

However, the second half, starting from where the main lead is taken prisoner as payback for his actions in the first half of the film, well it’s no less action packed but I found it mostly very dull (until Sigourney Weaver brings in the X-Wings at the end). I was looking at my watch in this part of the film because, yeah, it got gruellingly boring for me, I have to admit. 

Overall, though, the first half won me over somewhat and you do need to see this one on a big screen to fully capture the spectacle. Director Martin Scorcese turns up at one point (though you might not recognise him at first) and there’s a nice, if somewhat blatant, lifesize reconstruction of the Star Wars chess game from the original movie. Look at the floor of the arena and a better look at the aliens fighting there and you’ll see what I mean. But, there are also some blatant references (I think one building even says Nexus 7) to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed here) on one planet, which look good and are also vaguely reminiscent of stuff they’ve borrowed in other films in the franchise, such as Attack Of The Clones (reviewed here) but, nice as these sequences were (and they are pretty good at this stage of the movie), they didn’t quite add up to Star Wars for me. 

However, Ludwig Göransson’s score, which I’m complaining about a little above, is also pretty good and uses the themes he’s developed in the show pretty well (I might try and get a CD from somewhere if they bother to release it in this essential format). And I also thought the effects work, which some people seem to be complaining about, actually worked pretty well in this movie. Especially the one for the character of the son of Jabba The Hutt, which looks a bit clunky but certainly convinces you that a creature like this could do the things it does without crumpling to the floor every five seconds.

And that’s me done with The Mandalorian And Grogu... I hated the second half of the movie but I mostly had a good time with the rest of it and I’m glad I caught it at my local cinema, who seemed to have absolutely no clue as how to frame it on their screens but, yeah, lack of competency of the staff at Cineworld seems to be a thing which really hasn’t gotten better over the decades. Oh well.  

My 2900th Blog Post

 

The Great London 
Film And Comic... con

My 2900th Post 

For my 2900th post I thought I would like to bring to light the current escalation of the actions (some might even say crimes) committed by the London Film And Comic Con, which I used to love going to every year until the dreaded day that they did this (back in 2014). Since then, I’ve gone pretty much every year (as it’s the excuse I need to take the day off work when the blooming ‘Staff Barbecue’ is held) and, the list of egotistical celebrities just keeps getting bigger and bigger (I wish they wouldn’t invite ‘guests’ to these things at all if this is what happens) while the amount of choice on the stalls keeps getting smaller and smaller. I’ve seen a number of my regular dealers from other film fairs stop attending this one for pretty much the same reason... the wrong kind of audience being attracted by the dubious celebrities and treating the once main attraction, the stalls of merchandise, as a secondary add on. 

But I still like to go because the few different kinds of stalls they have there are usually quite unique when compared to the other, far superior, film fairs I attend every year (where else would you find pink, knitted Daleks and homemade Alpacas?). 

So once again, this year, I bought my advanced ticket to the 2026 show. Now I found it strange that, instead of the usual early July date (with, once again, what was always the best day of the show, the Friday, when the stalls have not been ransacked by other attendees waiting until the Saturday) being suspiciously absent once more... they’d replaced it with an early, Saturday or Sunday only June date. Okay, I could live with that and, once I’d seethed and raged quite a bit, I could also live with the bizarrely expensive increase on the ticket price, gone up another £6 this year to a staggering £31 entrance fee (for just the stalls, which is the ticket I always buy and which, before they got so pseudo-popular, always used to cost around a fiver). And, so it was booked and I didn’t have to worry about it again.

Except I did. 

A few weeks ago I received an email from the organisers of the London Film And Comic Con which started out with the very diplomatically worded phrase... “Sadly, we have had to take the difficult decision to postpone London Film and Comic Con 2026 to August 2027.” No people, if you postpone something until a date taking place even after the next annual event was supposed to happen... it’s not a postponement, it’s a cancellation! And, of course, rather than straight refund people without a lot of tomfoolery in trying to contact them, they decided to keep the money and just reassign the ticket to the new August date. Because of course they would, that’s how certain organisations like this operate I guess (and don’t get me started on theatre ticket, non-refund expectations during the pandemic). 

Reasons for this postponement/cancellation listed in the email used phrases like “airline costs rising sharply and ongoing uncertainty around flight availability”, “unfolding global issues”, “increasing energy shortages” and “rising cost of living”... that last specifically talking about the fact that they have the audacity to charge for autographs and snaps with the celebs! 

And I’m really not happy about this. All the decisions made here are to do with the string of guests they wanted to attend... many of which usually seem to be of the ‘third stormtrooper from the right’ in this film, ‘fifth Ewok from the left’ in this film, someone who ‘dressed up as a Dalek once’ variety... amongst the smattering of bigger guests who charge even more money for the privilege (if you care to call it that).

But what about people like me? 

I don’t give a hoot about the celebrities! I just want to visit the stalls. C’mon... what about remembering the real value and atmosphere of the ‘event’ of the humble Film Fair? Not what it seems to have unfortunately mutated into, in the hands of some certain showrunners. 

Once again the organisers seem to be getting away with it but, food for thought, my main concern after reading their email (asides from being cheated out of a day in London, shopping for unique merchandise) is... who is to say it won’t also be cancelled next year? Will there even be a London Film And Comic Con still standing or will it just sink into bankruptcy because of rubbish decisions like this?

Anyway, thought I’d spread the news here so people who were thinking of going again this year... and who are scratching their heads when they find next year’s dates on the website, know about it... well at least you’ve been informed somewhere, even if it’s just on this blog, that the show isn’t going ahead in 2026. It might have been nice to put that up on the landing page of their own website though. This is nuts!

So that’s my latest rant and my 2900th Post. Thanks so much for reading, always grateful. Normal reviewing service will return on my next post.

Blake’s 7

Apostrophe Now!

Blake’s 7

Series 1 
January - March 1978
13 episodes

Series 2 
January - April 1979 
13 episodes

BBC Blu Ray Region B

Warning: Some general spoilers.

An unexpected disclaimer: This review was always meant to go up on the blog today and I've had it loaded in for a week or two now, ready to publish. So it's a sad coincidence that I learned two days ago, along with everyone else, of the passing of Michael Keating who delighted so many viewers of this show as the comical and cowardly thief Vila, one of the best characters in the show and one of the few actors who actually saw through all four series. So I guess, inadvertently but no less empathetically, this particular post is also a tribute to the quiet genius of Keating's personification of Vila. He will be much missed and certainly much remembered. 

I hadn’t seen Blake’s 7 since I was a kid, when I used to like the show a fair bit but, in the intervening decades, I’d forgotten why. Now, however, the BBC are... very, very slowly... releasing the four series in Blu Ray sets and, it has to be said, they’re looking pretty good. Now, one of the options (and this is presumably why the releases are taking so long to bring out) is to watch the shows with newly added and augmented special effects... which to me kinda defeats the object entirely of watching the show again. If I want to recapture the show of my youth, which was known to us kids in the playground for having the absolutely cheapest, shoddiest looking effects work, even worse than Doctor Who, then I want to be watching it with the original model work (some of which is actually quite good) and the damned 2D cardboard cutouts of the ships moved about on visible sticks which the BBC tried to pretend were somehow serviceable. 

So that’s what I did.

And I have to say, I didn’t just have an okay time with these first two series... I had an absolute blast. Ten year old me perhaps hadn’t acknowledged just how well written and performed these shows were. Created by Terry Nation (creator of the Daleks), he wrote the majority of the first series episodes and brought in others to help out on the second. And it’s absolutely brilliant science fiction writing. Blake doesn’t assemble his band of rebels against the evil Imperial Federation straight away... it took a few episodes to set up. The world building on this show is incredible and constantly, judging from the first two years, evolving.

Yeah, although this was a family show the BBC didn’t steer away from complex adult issues like faked paedophilia accusations and occasional shots of bloody violence in the show. For instance, when Brian Blessed as a villain is making a nuisance of himself, the crew just teleport him into space and we watch him explode. 

At the end of the first episode, while he is being transported with other prisoners, Blake (played by Gareth Thomas), meets cowardly comic relief thief Vila (played by Michael Keating) and the glamorous but capable Jenna (played by Sally Knivette).  By the end of the second episode he also has the company of the brawny Gan (played by David Jackson) and the brilliantly cold and ruthless Avon (definitely my favourite character after all these years, played crisply by Paul Darrow). Blake and his new crew also steal an advanced alien ship, The Liberator, with a somewhat sophisticated computer called Zen, which they take as another crew member. 

The final team member (until another turns up in the last episode of series one) is Callly, played by Jan Chappell, who joins after a few episodes in. And the numbers and, indeed the title of the show, never made sense  The ship-board computer of their sophisticated and extremely beautiful alien spaceship is named as the seventh crew member but, the other computer crew member at the end of the first series, Orac, means there are technically eight of them by the end of that first year. 

The title logo was a good one too but, for some reason as a kid, I never noticed it was missing the apostrophe it so greatly needs to make any grammatical sense. I shall always call it by its grammatically correct name, though. 

Also during the first season, we gradually have the main villains set up. Jacqueline Pearce as the stunning (and sexually awakening, to a lot of teenagers in the UK at the time, by all accounts) and utterly ruthless Supreme Commander Servalan. Then there was her right arm, Space Commander Travis, played by Stephen Greif. His left arm was artificial with a laser which shot out of the finger and he had a nasty eye patch where Blake had destroyed half his face in years gone by... he was obsessed with hunting and killing Blake. In the second series, Brian Croucher replaces Greif as Travis and, I dunno, he is playing it in a completely different way to the former actor in the part. It’s a bit jarring to tell the truth... we noticed it then and, now we can watch episodes back to back, it’s very noticeable now. 

The thing about Blake’s 7 is... Blake didn’t always win or come out on top. Sometimes he got a little victory, sometimes it was a stalemate and, yeah, sometimes he lost in quite spectacular and damning fashion. And the regular characters were never safe from harm either. The death of Gan a little way into the second series, where he dies trying to hold up a ‘cave in’ to let Blake through... was shocking at the time. Blake’s ‘heavy’, with the limiter chip planted in his head by the Federation so he couldn’t intentionally kill someone, died in much the same way as Athos the musketeer does in the Alexandre Dumas book The Vicomte de Bragelonne (sometimes published as The Man In The Iron Mask) which was one of the sequels to The Three Musketeers. So I always wondered if Terry Nation had Athos in mind when he created the character. 

The teleport effects in the series are crude but quite cute... I always loved the outline of the figures who are being teleported being graphically shown as they ‘beamed down’ to a planet, as much as a distraction to the crude effect as anything else. 

One of the strengths of the new Blu Ray sets put out by the BBC is the wealth of extras. One I remembered very well and I was delighted to see, again, for the first time in so many years, is the segment of Blue Peter where the presenter showed the kiddies how to make a Blake’s 7 teleport bracelet out of a Lucozade bottle and some easily found or reconstructed household objects. The final result looked so good that it seemed obvious that this was indeed the same way the special effects department must have made them at the time. 

And, honestly, I was so surprised at just how good this was. Series One ended up with a vision of the graceful looking starship The Liberator being blown up with Blake and all aboard perishing... until we are reminded at the start of series two that it’s just a vision and also, we see how the vision really comes to play out. The Liberator itself would not be destroyed until, if memory serves, the end of the third series. The second series ends with the crew on their own in their small starship facing off an overwhelming fleet of alien invaders... rolling credits just as they are about to engage. Now, I don’t remember just how this is picked up in series three but I know that Blake and Jenna do not return. Well, Blake does for one episode and for the very last episode at the end of series four, when one of the most traumatic endings the children of the UK were ever subjected to played out... but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I was absolutely delighted to rediscover Blake’s 7 again on Blu Ray and really wasn’t expecting the writing and performances to be so good after all these years. Keeping my fingers crossed that Series 3 will be released very soon. 

Seoul Station

Seoul Destroying

Seoul Station
South Korea 2016
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho
Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

Where to start with Seoul Station. Well, technically it’s a prequel to the live action movie Train To Busan, by the same director, which I reviewed here. Although, I think he started working on this well before that movie, since this one was released only a month after that first film was released (to much success... which I suspect helped get the distribution deal pushed forward to let this one out of the gate). So I reckon that the correct point of view is probably that Train To Busan is actually a live action sequel to the animated movie Seoul Station but, whichever way you say it, since it’s set the day before the events in the other film, it makes it chronologically the first part of the trilogy which ended (to date), with Peninsula (another movie which I’ve not seen but thanks to the price of a fiver in Computer Exchange, I should be watching that one too fairly soon).

Now it’s been ages since I saw that first movie and I can’t remember much about it but, like most zombie movies, it gives no explanation of how the zombie virus actually got started. In this film, you see an infected homeless man pass away in the titular station and then start off the wave of zombies that are already unleashed during the events of that follow up (or whatever you want to call it) movie. 

However, don’t expect to find out what caused the zombie outbreak in the first place because, again like most tales in this genre, although you’re a little closer to ground zero in this movie... you still will be none the wiser as to any explanations for this plague. 

Now, the animation is nice enough and doesn’t look too cheap. Although, if my dad* is to be believed, it’s even worse than a 1970s Filmation cartoon in terms of animation... he bailed on it after a quarter of an hour. It’s... not as bad as 1970s Filmation but, it’s not Disney or Fleischer studios either. It just is what it is and in terms of the art of the ‘cartooning’ on this thing... I didn’t mind it.

But here’s the thing. It has more going for it than just the undead biting people up. It’s character driven... to the point where I thought the first half an hour was relentlessly slow and dull (it gets better) and it has a proper story which included a really neat twist near the end which, I honestly did not see coming. However, due to the way the characters are portrayed, not to mention the consequences of that surprise reveal, which I thought was visually going to be something much different to what it turned out to be... it’s also unrelentingly bleak. Much grimmer than the story portrayed in Train To Busan. Which is perhaps hard to believe given the unstoppable onslaught of people-munching going on throughout that particular movie but, trust me, though it’s not quite as gory as the live action counterpart... it’s vastly more cynical in its outlook. 

The film follows the exploits of a down-on-her-luck young lady who breaks off with her boyfriend, who is trying to pimp her out to pay their rent money. So they are split up and the outbreak leaves them unaware of each other’s locations. Meanwhile, the girl’s father catches up to the boyfriend and threatens him into helping him to find her. Then the zombie pandemic begins and the film cross cuts between the girl and the chaotic experiences she finds herself in... and the boyfriend and father trying to locate her. And it’s... not too terrifying, it has to be said but, like I said, it’s unrelentingly dark. Especially in terms of redeemable characters, for sure. 

My primary criticism of the movie... and this seems to be a more blatant trope of horror films lately, it seems to me... is the unrelenting stupidity of the main protagonists to not keep themselves out of trouble or improve their situation. If you are on the phone to your girlfriend, for example... and she’s just given you her location, you don’t wait on the phone for five minutes to hear how the carnage is playing out on her end of the line... you get in your car and you rescue her pronto, right? Well, apparently not, in the case of these characters, it seems. And, surely, if you are running through buildings, away from zombies who want to eat you... maybe shut a few doors behind you on your way? I mean, the actions of these characters do not endear me to the idea of ever standing beside them if I was ever in a zombie apocalypse. Their choices are just really stupid.

But, it’s an okay film and, that final twist, which makes room for even more bleakness, more than makes up for some of the film’s deficiencies. I mean, yeah, Train To Busan is by far the better, more watchable picture but, I dunno, Seoul Station is so unwavering in its cynical outlook (and has very strong language throughout) that I found the whole experience quite enticing for a while.

But, yeah, that’s me done on Seoul Station and, if you like Train To Busan then you will probably enjoy this one, to some extent. It has so much more going on for it than just being another zombie movie, I reckon. 

 * I wrote this review early last year, when he was still with us. 

The People That Time Forgot

Forget Me Not

The People That Time Forgot
Directed by Kevin Connor
UK/USA 1977
Amicus/AIP
Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Another near end spoiler.

The third film in Imprint’s wonderful Tales Of Adventure Collection Volume Nine, following on from my favourite in the box, At The Earths Core (you can read a very old DVD review I wrote for that years ago here... be kind) is the direct sequel to The Land That Time Forgot (reviewed here). Namely, The People That Time Forgot, which was actually the very last, uncredited, film co-produced by Amicus studios. And once again, of course, based on the book by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the second of his Caspak trilogy of novels).

This one takes place a few years after the events of the first movie which, if you remember, left Tyler (played by Doug McClure) and Lisa (played by Susan Penhaligon), stranded on the island by the end of the picture. This sequel, which I did see at my local cinema back in 1977, felt a bit of a let down as a kid, mainly I think because I hadn’t seen the first one in the series at the time. And, I have to say that, looking at it now, a film I can barely remember through the intervening  years, it’s not a good movie and certainly inferior to the much more fun first film.

Again, though, it’s a bit of a star studded cast, as four loyal crew members are taken to near the Island from the first film in search of Doug McClure... having received his flask with the message washed up from the sea. Four of them fly a bi-plane above an ice wall and onto Caspak (the name of which, again, gets no mention) and crash there, after an aeroplane and machine gun battle with a pterodactyl takes a turn for the worse. The four are Tyler’s old friend Ben, played by Patrick (son of John) Wayne, photographer Charly, played by the great Sarah Douglas, sporting the same hairstyle as Princess Leia in the first Star Wars movie (although this one beat it out in the UK and it wasn’t a deliberate lift, it would seem), dinosaur expert Norfolk, played by the always watchable Thorley Walters and, as Ben’s fellow American, the great Shane Rimmer.

And from here on it’s shenanigans as the four try to find Tyler, dodging dinosaurs and fighting various species who want to kill them or sacrifice them to their volcano God. Luckily, they stumble upon Ajor, played by the glamourous Dana Gillespie who here, it has to be said, manages to be wearing a costume even more revealing than the one she wore in Hammer’s The Lost Continent (reviewed by me here). And in some ways I have to say ‘thank goodness for that’ because, although it’s not really a good thing to say that Gillespie’s huge assets are a better special effect than any of the dinosaurs (or the matte paintings) here, it does at least give a certain percentage of the film’s audience something interesting to look at when the film is flagging and... yeah, it flags quite a lot. 

And when they do finally catch up with Doug McClure’s Tyler towards the end of the film, after they’ve been captured by a masked race of people who, for some reason best known to the production designers, are all dressed in something very similar to samurai armour and have Dave Prowse as their chief executioner, it’s all for nothing. Not long after finding Lisa has formerly perished at the hands of the leader of these Samurai people (played by Milton Reid, who tried to kill James Bond in a scene in The Spy Who Loved Me, reviewed here), Tyler himself sacrifices his life trying to get his rescuers to safety. They take Ajor with them back to civilisation as the island starts to get all volcanic again. 

And yeah, this is by far the inferior of the two Caspak movies from this period and, although I found John Scott’s score to The People That Time Forgot much more interesting, it doesn’t really save the film. It’s not too badly made as a piece but it does seem like it’s badly paced and, yeah, not enough dinosaurs on the rampage... only Dana’s rampaging bosoms, which are pretty good but not something you can really hang a movie on, no matter how much you can appreciate her performance here. I did like her better in the aforementioned The Lost Continent, it has to be said. Not a recommendation but, it is at least an interesting choice for a sequel and worth watching the once, I reckon. 

Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s

 

Exorcising Demons

Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural 
Paranoia In The 1980s
Edited by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe
Fab Press/Spectacular Optical
ISBN: 9781903254868

Just a very brief shout out now to a book edited by one of my favourite movie people, Kier-La Janisse... Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s. This one took me out of my comfort zone a little because it’s not exclusively about movies but, I saw it on the Fab Press stall at Bank Holiday FrightFest a couple of years ago and, it being one of the very few books I didn’t already own on the stall and, to boot, a tome I’d been keeping a look out for since it’s first US edition on Kier-La’s Spectacular Optical publishing arm, I thought I’d finally pick it up and give it a go. 

The book is a collection of various essays by a variety of authors, such as Alison Nastasi and the redoubtable Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, on various aspects of the absolute alarm caused by parents and other authority figures who believed the ‘youth of today’ were being attacked/corrupted/coerced/recruited by various devil worshipping organisations/unofficial groups during the 1980s. 

Now, I have to say, 90% of the contents of the book was completely unknown to me and this tome covers a variety of manifestations such as child molestation rings/enthusiastic money grabbing preachers and many other ‘authority figures gone wrong’, sometimes by first hand witnesses of the people and organisations in question. Although there certainly is some overlap with UK slants on the phenomenon, such as the worry, even in this country, about the game Dungeons And Dragons... once again proving that whenever anyone is given a creative outlet which any one group of individuals doesn’t understand, there’s going to be a huge push back by some of the more ignorant of them, as they seem to have a habit of empowering those gullible enough to throw in with their lot. 

So, yeah, I think you get the idea... if you were into heavy metal music, gaming, horror movies and various other stuff... you were going to be targeted as a devil extolling, malevolent presence in somebody’s life. 

The book is full of stuff I’d never heard of such as the Procter And Gamble logo being a manifestation of 666, religious comics, White Metal (or Christian Metal) music, teenage murder, paedophilia rings and so on. Those interested in film will also find some good things to contemplate here... such as an article on horror movies utilising ‘devil worship via computers’ such as Evilspeak and a nice chapter on Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs. There’s also stuff about the Dungeons And Dragons missing person case that inspired the novel and subsequent movie of Mazes And Monsters (which I reviewed here) so, there were some elements familiar to me in the book. But, of course, it’s precisely because a lot of the things covered is stuff I’m not so well acquainted with, that makes it a valuable addition to my book shelves... err... book piles (like I could ever get enough shelves installed). There’s one very interesting chapter, for example, about devil cult books published by Playboy magazine as an imprint, which were deliberately marketed to susceptible female readers while the books actually seemed to favour wanting to show control over women. It’s fascinating stuff, to be sure.

And I’m going to get out of this review now while the getting’s good, I think. So I’ll just leave you with the thought that Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s is, if nothing else (and I’m sure it probably is a lot more to many readers), an entertaining and educational read, throwing light onto subjects which, due to the country I live in more than anything else, were certainly unknown to me in a lot of cases. Definitely worth a read for the inquisitive minded at the very least and, with people like Heller-Nicholas on some of the chapters, you know it’s going to be well researched and written, for sure.